by Maajid Nawaz
The miniature Qur’an I took from my flat, the last thing I took before leaving Ammar and Rabia behind, had somehow remained with me throughout my time in the torture cells. I would hold it up and wave it in full view while I shouted my slogans. It gave me strength and built my eeman. We were not criminals. We were proud political prisoners. We stood for Allah and His messenger, we stood for justice against tyranny and we were blessed to be chosen by Allah, as the ambassadors of eeman. Sure enough, our actions reached the world’s media—TV, radio, print, and the rising Internet. The whole world was talking about the British political prisoners who claimed they had been tortured in Mubarak’s dungeons.
The courtroom was packed. This was the first time that foreign nationals had been tried in a case involving torture. This created somewhat of a media frenzy. And it was in the courtroom that I discovered just how badly some of the other brothers had been treated. One of the brothers, Ahmed, described how his wife had been stripped and tortured before his eyes in order to force him to confess. Sadly his story was far from unique. We quickly used those moments in the cage to announce to the world how we had been treated. Journalists became fascinated with our case: liberals, Islamists, socialists, all began to sympathize with what had happened to us; news of our plight was spreading far and wide.
Everyone in that cage pleaded not guilty to the charges. But unlike our Egyptian brothers, we three Britons also admitted to our membership of Hizb al-Tahrir in the UK. As HT was legal there, we felt there was nothing to hide. In one of the subsequent court sessions, a letter was delivered from Jalaluddin Patel, the young HT leader in the UK who had tried to marginalize me after my return from Pakistan. The letter felt like a sofa-critique of how we had all carried ourselves. According to him we should have pleaded guilty, shown more defiance, and the Egyptian members should never have denied their affiliation to HT. We were disgusted. Jalaluddin, sitting in London, had the nerve to tell these men how to behave?
We wrote back immediately: you are no longer in our chain of command; we fall under the jurisdiction of HT Egypt. Its leader is in this very cage with us, having been tortured nonstop for three and a half months. These brothers have watched their wives tortured in front of them. You have not the right or moral claim to tell us what to do, and in doing so you presume to violate our channels of communication. Do not write to us again. Thankfully, he never did.
Right away, you could sense just how much the system was stacked against us. The judge, whose name was Ashmawi, would sit at the top of the bench, right next to the leading prosecutor, Walid Minshawi. As the case was to be tried under Emergency Law, both the judge and prosecutor were appointed by Aman al-Dawlah. The defense lawyers, meanwhile, were seated at the opposite end of the courtroom with the accused.
The three of us chose a brave man called Ahmed Saif as our lawyer. Saif’s political views couldn’t have been more different from ours. Saif was a communist, which under normal circumstances would have been anathema to our Islamism, but he had our respect. Saif had been imprisoned many times under Mubarak’s regime, and yet he still continued to speak out fearlessly. We might have held different political views, but Saif was every bit as anti-regime as we were.*
* A couple of years later, Ahmed Saif would go on to become a key founding member of the Kifayah, or “Enough,” movement, a liberal collective that decided to break the taboo of openly challenging Mubarak’s authority in public. In those days, in Egypt, this was an absolute red line. Later on, while serving my sentence, I would read of Kifayah’s brave anti-Mubarak protests. They would gather openly in the streets, attracting only around ten or twenty brave souls, surrounded by hundreds of riot police, and most people would laugh at their delusions of change. But Kifayah became the collective that ultimately snowballed into the Egypt uprising, led by liberal youth, in 2011. History, it would turn out, was on Ahmed Saif’s side.
Almost two years after our arrest, on the day before we were due to be sentenced, Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, was on a state visit to Jerusalem—al-Quds. Maher was a short, fat man with a huge bald head and a pointed nose. He looked like the Penguin from Batman, and we found this image of him comforting. As part of Maher’s visit to al-Quds, he went to pray in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, the very same mosque where I had met all the HT brothers, and where I agreed with Issam Amireh that I would one day return. HT was founded in al-Quds, and we had a strong force of brothers all over Palestine. When Maher entered the mosque, to his utter horror, and the TV cameras’ delight, he was met by a large group of HT protesters. They greeted him with a barrage of shoes and slippers hurled at him with abandon.
“Get out, you kha’in—traitor!” they shouted at him, as slippers rained down.
“Zalim—despot! Agent of America! You torture our brothers in Egypt, and think you can come into our mosque and pray? La ahlan wa la sahlan—you are not welcome in this mosque, out!”
Back at our prison, as the radio announced the humiliation of untouchable Ahmed Maher, the brothers, young and old, Islamist, jihadist, liberal, all whooped and rejoiced in spontaneous celebration. Allahu akbar! Taste a fraction of what you have put us through, and see how you like it!
The next day, Egypt’s national papers were full of images of the Penguin being hit by slippers. It was a real day of victory for us. The Egyptian state would not let this one go, and sure enough, they took their revenge. In the wake of the assault, our sentencing date was delayed by another three months. When we were finally taken to court, the judge announced that he was dropping all the original charges against us, only to replace them with a single, new charge: intimaa—membership of a banned organization. After two years of a painfully slow trial, this time around there was to be no new discussion, no new defense. There and then, we were charged anew, convicted, and found guilty within the same session, on the same day.
“Intimaa” was a far more serious charge. Reza, Ian, and I were all sentenced to five years in prison: the other defendants got a mixture of between five and ten years for their membership of HT. As these sentences were read aloud in court, families began to cry, journalists began scurrying, and we rose up in defiance. Like lions roaring with pride, the courtroom was ablaze with our chants and slogans.
“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! We will never surrender!”
We began congratulating and embracing one another in the cage, and chanting and praying and prostrating in thanks to Allah for this opportunity to present our sacrifice for His cause. The judge rushed out of the courtroom in fear, and Walid Minshawi looked on in utter confusion: How can they be celebrating? If I were in their place, I’d be crying. And we did cry, tears of devotion to Allah, tears of love, tears of piety, the romanticism of struggle, and we knew we would go down in history. People would look to us and be inspired.
After two years, once the verdict was finally passed, in between frequent letters, we began receiving occasional family visits. How can I forget that day, Ammar, when you first came plodding along, by now a three-year-old, not knowing your Abu except for seeing him in chains on television screens? It’s been two and a half years, my son. Two and a half years since these zalimun first tore you crying from my arms. And you came dressed in trousers, shirt, and tie, and extended your hand out to greet me, “assalaamu alaykum, Abu,” unsure of how formal I expected you to be. And I swept you up in my arms, not wanting you to see the tears welling in my eyes, and I held you close for all the years I was unable to hold you, for the days in the dungeons when I thought I might never see you again. I was so proud of your mother who had kept the memory of me alive within you.
Your mother approached me that day, her radiant face so happy, so proud and smiling at the visage of her man who had proven his sincerity to Allah’s cause. And instantly, just by holding her in my embrace for the first time since my arrest, all my pain melted away, nothing mattered any more. My ghimamah of darkness had been lifted, and all I could see w
as the glow of your countenance. How happy I was on that day.
When Ash, my trusty HT protégé in SOAS days, came to visit me in Mazrah Tora, I was naturally excited.
“Ash, what’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know how to tell you this,” he said, “but I’ve left the group. I’ve left HT.”
“Why, what happened?” I asked disappointedly.
“I don’t believe in it anymore,” he answered; and then in his typically irreverent way, “It’s all bullshit, bro, the whole damn thing, they’re a bunch of Muppets, clueless thick idiots, they’re an embarrassment to Islam and Muslims.”
Ash explained how he had become disillusioned with HT members, then with the group itself, and eventually with the ideology. Instead, he had become interested in Sufi mysticism.
“You’re a bright person, Maajid,” he said. “I know for a fact that you’ll work all of this out and come to the same conclusions that I did.”
My reaction was to laugh this off.
Ash was insistent though. “In Sufism, you have a sheikh, a spiritual guide,” he continued. “My sheikh told me before I came here that he’d had a dream about you. He told me that not only are you going to leave Hizb al-Tahrir, but that you’re going to become a great leader for Muslims.”
“Subhan Allah—can you hear yourself, bro?” I said and laughed.
“It’s true,” Ash said, shaking his head. “That’s what I came to tell you, and that’s why I came.”
I dismissed Ash’s flattery as that of a friend overcome by emotion on seeing his one-time mentor in prison. But even so, there was something about the confidence with which Ash spoke that struck me.
Life doesn’t stand still just because you are in prison. During those years my parents’ relationship finally cracked, and they divorced. By the time Abi came to see me she had met a friend, who accompanied her to Egypt on prison visits. He was an Englishman, a non-Muslim, and they were not married. For the first time since my incarceration, my liberal upbringing was on public display in front of the top cadre of Egypt’s hard-core jihadist scene, and I was torn: they’re not married, he’s a kafir, this is haram, prohibited. But he’s come all this way to look after Abi, he’s waiting outside the prison in the desert heat, from fear of offending me. This is a noble man, like Dave Gomer, like Mr. Moth. And so I found a solution.
“Can I conduct an Islamic rite, the nikah ceremony, to legitimize your relationship before Allah? It’s just some prayers before two witnesses,” I asked Abi.
“If it makes you happy.”
“But he’ll need to embrace Islam first—pronounce his shahadah, the testimony of faith. I can teach him what to say,” I said.
“I just want you to be happy.”
In this way, right there in the visiting area of Mazrah Tora prison, I supervised the conversion and Islamic nikah ceremony for Abi and her partner. I asked him to repeat after me, “Laa ilaaha illa Allah . . . There is no God but the One God, Muhammad ar-rasool Allah . . . and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” As my two witnesses I called over two of my prison friends, Omar, a Dagestani, and Hisham, a Dutch-Egyptian jihadist, famous for flying into momentous fits of rage against the prison authorities. I don’t think Abi or her partner quite understood what the witnesses to their nikah were in jail for. Equally, I don’t think Omar and Hisham quite understood Abi’s and her partner’s views. As far as my jihadist friends were concerned, I had just successfully converted someone to the Islamist cause. They were overjoyed, sharing a few sweets around the visiting area.
“Maajid’s mother and her partner have just embraced Islam,” they announced with warm smiles across the room. The implication being, of course, that, by virtue of being in this relationship, Abi had not already been a Muslim. Hisham, the Dutch-Egyptian jihadist, embraced Abi’s partner in a long, tight hug. Hisham then explained how he must never compromise on his new faith, to always remain strong, and to remember to fight the enemies of Allah wherever he finds them. The Englishman nodded in sincere agreement, and Hisham hugged him again, believing he had just witnessed the creation of another martyr for Islam.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Monocracy”
Mazrah Tora, where we would serve out the remainder of our sentence, was no ordinary prison. Originally built by the British in the days of the protectorate in order to hold political prisoners, it stayed ever true to its purpose. Over the years Mazrah Tora has held some of Islamism’s most well-known ideologues. This was the prison where Sayyid Qutb, the ideological godfather of modern-day Jihadism, was held. It was at Mazrah Tora that Qutb wrote his seminal Ma’alim fi al-Tariq or Milestones, which led to his execution in 1966, instantly turning him into a flame that would light the sky for thousands of future Islamists.
The manuscript for Milestones was smuggled out of this prison by Mohammed al-Badei, a young devotee of Qutb’s at the time and a member of Egypt’s largest Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. By the time I got to Mazrah Tora, Dr. Badei had again been imprisoned along with many of the Brotherhood’s leadership in the case known as “The Professors,” Qadiyat al-Asaatiza. By now he was a member of the leadership of the Brotherhood, serving on their Office of Guidance—Maktab al-Irshad. During those days we became close, exchanging many stories about his friendship with Qutb.
Badei would go on to become Murshid al-‘aam, the Supreme Leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. After Mubarak’s removal in 2011, the new Egypt is practically ruled by his group. Among other Muslim Brotherhood prisoners there were Dr. Essam el-Aryan, their spokesman at the time; and Abdul Monim Abul Fatouh, an Islamist presidential hopeful. The Brotherhood was not revolutionary or militant Islamists, and as such their members usually attracted shorter sentences, typically two or three years.
There were also many members of al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, which until its ceasefire in 1999 had been Egypt’s largest terrorist organization. This was the larger faction that broke away from Salim al-Rahhal’s Tanzim al-Jihad after the assassination of President Sadat. Following their ceasefire, the majority of Gama’a’s members signed up to what became known as the muraja’aat or “revisions,” essentially renouncing their former militancy. However, they remained Salafists in doctrine and nonviolent Islamists in ideology. Among their number, with us throughout the holy month of Ramadan, was one of their founders, Sheikh Salah Hashim.
There were still prisoners at Mazrah Tora who had been involved in the assassination of Sadat back in 1981. The main assassins had been executed, but those involved in the plot who were still incarcerated included former Egyptian military intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel Aboud al-Zommor and his cousin Tareq al-Zommor, who were held in our wider prison complex, and Dr. Tariq and Salah Bayoumi, who were held in our block.
Some of those executed in this case had been sent to their deaths back in 1982 by Maher el-Guindi, who was then the public prosecutor. As the years progressed, el-Guindi had gone on to become the governor of the province of Giza. One day the prison was alive with commotion. “What is it, what’s going on?” I asked. Maher el-Guindi has been convicted for bribery and corruption, I was told. He would be joining us here in Mazrah Tora, to live among the remainder of the Sadat case, those still left alive after he sent their colleagues to the gallows. An extremely odd scenario unfolded that week in Mazrah, as some of the assassins of Sadat sat in conversation with the public prosecutor who had led the case for their convictions twenty-two years earlier.
“That man was a bloodhound, supervising interrogations over brutal torture, and I never stopped my du’a, my prayers, that one day he too would see justice as we have,” Salah Bayoumi said to me that day. “Allah never raises anyone high except that he brings them down again. You watch, Maagid, one day my Lord will place Mubarak in here too, bi iznillah, with God’s permission.”
There were other jihadists too, like Akram, a British-Egyptian accused
of supporting Islamic Jihad, Ayman Zawahiri’s group before he joined bin Laden and started al-Qaeda. We befriended Akram and helped him to make consular contact after he told us tales of his brutal torture. Soon, a number of new foreign nationals began to arrive. They had all been convicted in the case known as Qadiyat al-wa’ad. These were a new breed of global jihadists, raised under the shadow of al-Qaeda. International, extreme, fully trained, and dangerous, they cut an intimidating specter. There were two Dagestanis, built like Russian bears: Omar Hajiyev and Ahmed. Omar was a professional bomb-maker. Having learned his trade in Chechnya and Afghanistan, he had been making his way to Gaza in an effort to train Hamas in his deadly skill. He had been sentenced to seventeen years in jail, but I often wonder what became of him after the mass prison breakouts during Egypt’s uprising a few years ago.
Finally, at the other end of the political spectrum, there were leading liberal political prisoners and even those accused of homosexuality from Egypt’s infamous “Queen Boat” case—where fifty-two men were arrested for being on a floating gay nightclub. A blue-eyed, well-off Egyptian named Sharif was the most visible prisoner accused in that case. Imagine if you can the dynamics between the jihadists and those from the Queen Boat case, being held in the same prison block.
Two of President Mubarak’s more high-profile liberal rivals, heads of the Tomorrow Party, were there as well: presidential candidate Ayman Nour and sociology lecturer Sa’ad el-Din Ibrahim. Nour had stood against Mubarak for the presidency in 2005, finishing second. In other words, he won. As his reward, he was duly accused of fraudulently acquiring signatures to register his party, all one hundred of them, and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment. His criminal conviction meant that he was barred from standing for president again.